We can read our Bibles and be confident that we have the message God intended for us. In summary, the Old Testament is trustworthy and the translations we have today are an accurate reflection of the original (as is true of the New Testament for similar reasons). This brings up the related question of what the best English translations are, but that is a subject for another day.

Today, we have a number of good English translations that allow us to get an accurate idea of what the original writers were saying. Occasionally, translations will differ in a particular place, but this is relatively rare, and this does not affect primary teachings. A second reason for confidence is the remarkable consistency among the modern translations. Any modern translation can be compared against the originals for accuracy. How do we know that our current translations are faithful to what the original authors wrote? The most important reason for confidence in the translations is that we know the contents of the original Hebrew (and in a few instances Aramaic) manuscripts. After all, not everyone can be a Hebrew or Greek scholar. The second issue in determining whether we have an accurate reflection of the original Old Testament involves the translation process. Most importantly, no substantive issues affecting the Christian faith are affected. Most of this remaining 0.5 percent deals with issues such as spelling of names (for example, Hannah versus Hanna). Using the science of textual criticism, we know for certain about 99.5 percent of the original contents of the Bible in the original languages, and in the other 0.5 percent we know what the all the options are. This is evidence of how accurate the copying process was. And the level of agreement between the manuscripts is astounding. Scribes counted not only words, but characters in the documents they were copying, and if the numbers did not match, they would go back and recheck their work.įor a long time, the earliest copies of the Old Testament we had were from the 10th century AD, but the Dead Sea Scrolls allowed us to see manuscripts of some Old Testament books from over 1,000 years before. We have evidence from comparing newer and older copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, that the copying was extremely accurate. First, we need address the process of copying manuscripts. The second question is about whether the Bible we have today is an accurate reflection of what was originally written. Their messages have unique characteristics, but it is the same Master Writer speaking through them all. Similarly, the prophets can be likened to different instruments. Each instrument has its own distinct sound, but it is the same musician who is playing. One way to think about this is to use the analogy of a master musician, who can play a piano, a violin, a guitar, a flute, etc. Some people might ask why the books show the distinctive personalities of their writers. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter 1:20-21 says, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation of things. All of the prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit to write down their messages. Moses wrote down many things that God told him personally (Exodus 24:4, Deuteronomy 31:9).

For example, Exodus 33:11 says that God spoke to Moses “face to face” as a man speaks to his friend. The apostles were very clear that what was written was what God wanted written. To address whether the Old Testament is trustworthy, we need to determine who wrote the Bible and whether we have trustworthy copies of what they wrote. Is the Old Testament trustworthy or accurate to the original?

Old testament manuscripts